Youth Social Work

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Youth social work is a service of child and youth welfare according to § 13 SGB ​​VIII .

basis

While youth work is about general support for young people, the aim of youth social work is to offer young people socio-educational assistance that compensates for social disadvantage or overcomes individual impairments. Areas of help are:

  • school education
  • vocational training, integration into the world of work
  • social integration .

Fields of action of youth social work

The fields of action of youth social work are:

These aids are holistic, ie, in addition to imparting professional skills and qualifications, personalization and socialization aids are also offered.

Carrier of youth social work

The organizations of youth social work are primarily the institutions of the sponsoring groups that were grouped together in the BAG youth work until June 2007. In addition, youth social work measures are also offered by public institutions , by educational institutions for the skilled trades and increasingly also by commercial institutions.

The BAG Youth Social Work dissolved on June 30, 2007. Instead, on July 1, 2007, the cooperation network for youth social work started its activities. In the cooperation group are the Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO), the Federal Working Groups Protestant and Catholic Youth Social Work (BAG EJSA and BAG KJS), the Federal Working Group of local regional youth social work organizations (BAG ÖRT), the German Red Cross (DRK), the International Federation (IB) and the Paritätische Gesamtverband (short: DER PARITÄTISCHE) is involved.

financing

By far the largest part of youth social work promotion measures is financed by the Federal Employment Agency. In addition, financial resources also come from the municipalities, through specific state programs and model programs from the federal child and youth plan. In recent years, European funding instruments, such as the European Social Fund (ESF), have also become more and more important.

target group

The target groups of youth social work are socially disadvantaged and individually handicapped young people up to the age of 27. Socially disadvantaged young people are young people who, due to their family and social environment, their ethnic or cultural origin or their economic situation, have experienced disadvantages that make it difficult for them to integrate into society and make the transition from school to work. On the other hand, adolescents who suffer from learning disabilities or learning impairments, who have psychological or physical impairments, who have become addicted to drugs or who already have a criminal career behind are individually impaired. In this sense, it is above all the following young people who can be found in youth social work:

  • Secondary and special school students with poor or missing qualifications,
  • Early school leavers,
  • Dropouts,
  • Adolescents with socialization deficits,
  • Young people from the field of educational assistance,
  • Adolescents with criminal careers and drug experience,
  • (learn) disabled young people,
  • Young people with a migration background.

history

By the time the Second World War ended in May 1945, millions of people had become homeless or homeless, were widowed or orphaned, or had lost all their belongings. This situation hit young people particularly hard. After the Second World War in 1947/1948, more than 1.5 million young people were orphaned or half-orphans, 2 million young people without a home and around 500,000 young people without work or training. In addition, the number of young refugees from the Soviet occupation zone to the western occupation zones increased.

Against this background, measures were taken at an early stage to alleviate the plight of the youth. In addition to the establishment of youth, social and labor authorities in federal states and municipalities, the first youth emergency services - today's youth migration services - were founded, which looked after young people who were unemployed, jobless and homeless in particular.

The vast majority of these practical youth social work measures during this time were carried out by independent organizations with different ideological and religious affiliations. The majority of these sponsors joined together in five sponsoring groups at the federal level, each of which is a working group itself. These are the Evangelical Support Group, the Catholic Support Group , the Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO) or also known as the Socialist Support Group, the Free Support Group ( DRK , IB , DPWV ) and the municipal, today local-regional support group (BAG ÖRT). In May 1949, these supporting groups founded the Federal Youth Development Work Group (BAG JAW), which later became the Federal Youth Social Work Group.

The guiding principle for the establishment of the BAG Youth Social Work was, on the one hand, to give each other suggestions and support in all questions relating to practical youth social work. On the other hand, it was considered necessary to bring about constant coordination of the measures to remedy the plight of young people at the federal and state levels, to inform each other about current developments and to provide the competent authorities with the experience of the providers in developing offers of assistance for the To be available to young people.

The first tasks of the newly founded BAG JAW consisted, among other things, of taking stock of the problems of the young people as well as of the previous aid and support measures, deriving from them concrete ideas and demands for nationwide youth social work and informing the public about the extent of youth hardship to inform. It was also important to find sources of finance for the urgently needed youth residences , youth community organizations and youth guilds .

In the following decades, the fields of activity of youth social work continued to develop. The BAG Youth Social Work and the supporting groups that it brings together played a key role in ensuring that youth social work as a whole faced current social challenges and developed approaches that responded to the actual needs and living conditions of disadvantaged young people.

In this context, youth social work works above all in the intersection of

Youth professional assistance

The unemployment of individually handicapped and socially disadvantaged young people is often predetermined after finishing school. For these target groups, Jugendberufshilfe maintains extensive and differentiated offers for professional orientation and qualification of these young people through advice, promotion of school qualifications, professional orientation, professional preparation, professional training, professional development and qualification, job placement and employment.

The offers of youth professional assistance require specific and socio-pedagogically particularly qualified assistance that meets the increased need for support. To this end, Jugendberufshilfe developed independent concepts and specific methods such as individual support planning, competence assessment, educational support, case management and career and life planning. An important guideline of youth careers assistance is the cooperation with the important institutions in the transition area from school to work (schools, labor administration, companies, youth welfare institutions, etc.).

Low-threshold offers are suitable for young people in the run-up to training, qualification and employment who can no longer be reached in the usual ways. With advice and offers of professional orientation (e.g. in youth workshops) they pursue the goal of motivating young people for professional qualifications (activation aids).

Vocational preparatory training offers are aimed at improving the professional ability to act as well as increasing the chances of integrating young people and young adults into training and work. Tailored to the different individuals and target groups, existing skills are promoted and existing deficits are reduced if necessary. The aim is also to impart basic skills and knowledge through internally differentiated and company-related qualification offers from sub-areas of recognized vocational training courses, usually in craft professions. The imparting of practical technical skills is supplemented by theoretical teaching. Vocational training measures (BvB) are accompanied socio-pedagogically by specialists from the youth vocational assistance service. If necessary, the secondary school leaving certificate can be made up at the BvB.

Aid to accompany training supports young people who are in a recognized occupation in company-based training. This includes measures to reduce language and educational deficits, additional support for specialist practice and specialist theory, and socio-educational support for the participants. They also serve to prevent training dropouts.

For young people who, for various reasons, cannot start their training in a company, the youth professional assistance providers offer the possibility of professional training in an external institution. An important support concept in external institutions is the socio-educational orientation of the vocational training. This concept provides for funding according to the "competence approach" and places particular emphasis on learning supportive methodology and didactics, practical training and theoretical learning combined with support lessons, offers for personal development and socio-educational help.

Aftercare

It is relatively common for training to be broken off before graduation. Young people who have successfully completed their training run the risk that their employer will not take them on and that they will not find a job elsewhere. In order to bridge these transitional periods, the youth career assistance offers the opportunity to continue training-related assistance until the start of further training or until the start of an employment relationship. This also applies to support measures that are required to consolidate an employment relationship (transitional assistance).

additional offers

Vocational training measures, support during training and socio-pedagogically oriented, external training represent the core area of ​​the vocational support for the disadvantaged in vocational assistance for young people. In addition, there is a wide range of specific assistance for young people's path to work and employment, such as youth advice centers, job and employment agencies or youth workshops . Other instruments are socio-pedagogically supported internships in companies ( entry-level qualification for young people ) and qualifying employment offers (since 2005 work opportunities according to SGB II). In order to give unemployed young people who have completed vocational training support during the transition into working life, further qualifying employment projects or special youth vocational support companies are provided in conjunction with placement and training measures.

Migration / integration (youth migration work)

Young people with a migration background (young repatriates, foreigners and refugees) live in Germany for very different reasons. Some of them were already born here. Many of them have also immigrated to the country or been driven out of their home country or have fled. They come from many different countries, speak different languages, have different degrees of schooling or professional training and live in very different social contexts. Their share is more than 15 percent of all young people in Germany and will continue to grow in the coming years.

If immigrant young people are to gain a foothold professionally and socially in Germany, special help and individual support offers must be available on site to help offset the migration-related problems and disadvantages of these young people. The independent youth social work organizations that are part of the BAG Youth Social Work therefore offer youth-specific integration aids in addition to offers of professional youth help, school social work and youth housing, which support and promote the youths on their way into German society.

Integration according to the understanding of youth social work is a permanent political and social task that affects all people living in the country. Promotion of integration is intended to enable immigrants to participate equally in economic, social, political and cultural life and to promote tolerance, acceptance and mutual respect between the population groups.

The youth migration services play a special role in the integration of young people. They are run by the independent youth social work organizations. Her work focuses on:

  • Primarily individual support for young new immigrants who are no longer required to attend school by means of case management before, during and after the integration courses,
  • Advice to young people with a migration background who need special support due to integration-related problems or a crisis situation,
  • Promotion through group offers for young newcomers as well as for young people with a migration background,
  • Mediation in further offers in the local network,
  • Cooperation and further development of local networks,
  • Initiation and management of other subsidized integration offers,
  • Initiation and support of the intercultural opening of services and institutions in public and independent sponsorship as well as the network partners.

In order to show young people in particular the situation in which young people with a migration background find themselves, what experiences, what skills they bring with them, what is new in Germany, what challenges they have to face in terms of language, school and professional life, the BAG Youth Social Work designed the traveling exhibition "different? - cool", which can be borrowed free of charge from the BAG Youth Social Work. This offer has been actively used since 2000.

Youth Housing

Youth living as part of youth social work - these are various forms of job-related accommodation for young people outside their parents' home, which are combined with socio-educational support. The target groups of youth housing are not exclusively individually handicapped and socially disadvantaged young people, but all young people who need accommodation in socio-educational forms of living during their school or vocational training measures. This gives young people the opportunity to become independent, to practice life with other people and to cope with everyday life.

Types of youth housing are essentially:

  • youth residences with socio-educational support,
  • socio-educationally supported residential communities,
  • Outdoor living groups,
  • Socio-pedagogically supported individual living (e.g. crisis living, living for young mothers etc.).

At the initiative of institutions, the BAG Youth Social Work and its supporting groups have decided to actively help shape the future of youth housing. The "Home away from home" project aims to support new ideas for strategies, financing, public image, networking and political lobbying.

Gender-specific work / gender mainstreaming

The realization that girls and young women in particular are often particularly disadvantaged due to their gender when transitioning from school to training or a job led to the development of specific approaches to girls' social work as early as the 1970s as part of the women's movement. Girls' social work is now a cross-sectional task that offers independent gender-specific help, takes into account female strengths and life concepts in the offers and measures and tries to reduce (social) disadvantages of girls and young women. In addition, there are now independent gender-specific offers for boys and young men, although their number is significantly lower than that of the girl-specific offers.

In addition to gender-specific youth social work, another gender policy principle has developed in recent years: gender mainstreaming . With this strategy, which was first mentioned and presented at the 3rd World Conference on Women of the United Nations in 1985 in Nairobi, the gender perspective is to be installed in all decisions and actions at all levels and real gender equality is to be achieved.

Since gender mainstreaming has been a mandatory guiding principle in the guidelines for the child and youth plan since January 2001, all youth welfare organizations - including those responsible for youth social work - are required to implement gender mainstreaming consistently at all levels of their organization. The gender perspective must now be included in all activities at every stage.

Since gender mainstreaming always explicitly focuses on both genders, the existing gender-specific strategies and approaches will not be abolished, but will continue to be pursued in the sense of a dual strategy to achieve gender equality .

Outreach youth social work

Outreach youth social work , like street work and mobile youth work, is based on low-threshold concepts of social work. This means that the offers (e.g. individual counseling, group work, project work and neighborhood work) are oriented towards the living environment of the young people concerned. Outreach youth social work does not wait for the young people until they find their way to the facilities on their own, but rather see them where they are. In contrast to mobile youth work and street work, the objective of outreach youth social work is somewhat more precisely defined and relates to the basic intention of Section 13 of Book VIII of the Social Code, namely the professional and social integration of socially disadvantaged and individually disabled young people. The focus of the assistance provided by outreach youth social work is therefore more geared towards the job-related mission of youth social work.

Mobile youth work

Mobile youth work / street work is an advocacy, partisan, environment and addressee-oriented field of youth welfare, which combines different approaches and principles of social work, namely outreach work (street work), individual help, group work and community work / social space orientation, in a socio-educational action concept. Mobile youth work / street work includes both youth work and youth social work. It is thus the interface between Section 11 and Section 13 of Book VIII of the Social Code. It is an offer of youth work that is oriented towards the environment and the addressees in accordance with Section 11 of Book VIII of the Social Code with a focus on preventive, everyday -oriented advice ( Section 11, Paragraph 3, No. 6 of Book VIII of the Social Code) with offers that relate to development tasks and problems that young people have to cope with in their families, schools and the world of work. Furthermore, mobile youth work / street work is a form of youth social work according to § 13 SGB ​​VIII for the social integration of young people who are more dependent on support to compensate for social disadvantages or to overcome individual impairments.

School social work

School social work has the task, together with all other actors in the school environment (teachers, students, parents), to design the school as a whole as a positive living environment for young people and, within the framework of school or student-related youth social work, the transition from school to to accompany the vocational training. In this context, school social work has increasingly appeared in recent years as a crisis manager in the event of school refusal and school fatigue.

School social work offers include:

  • Homework assistance, afternoon offers,
  • Advice, career planning,
  • Internship support, apprenticeship search,
  • Compulsory workshop offers.
  • social learning
  • Learn learn
  • Working with truants and school truants

The objectives of school social work are:

  • Promotion of school-relevant social behavior and social skills of students,
  • Limiting social abnormalities in school
  • Creation of a school climate that promotes learning
  • Moderation between school and parents
  • Advice and support for teachers with regard to the socio-educational mission of the school
  • In terms of prevention, school social work also includes pupils who are not considered problematic in its offers

The service areas:

  • Open offers
  • Socio-educational services in classes and groups
  • Socio-educational offers as part of all-day care
  • Socio-educational individual assistance
  • Services in cooperation with parents
  • Services of the cooperation with the school - teachers' colleges
  • Services of cooperation with institutions, associations, open youth work, churches and people in the city

Quality assurance elements:

  • The qualification of school social workers
  • The quality and scope of specialist advice
  • The quality of professional training
  • documentation
  • Advisory board (body made up of representatives from the city, the school, the parents, the district youth welfare office, the state education office and the school social work agency)
  • The personnel and material resources on site
  • The funding agreement

European dimensions of youth social work

The focus of the European Council on Employment and Innovation in Lisbon in March 2000 was "Employment, Economic Reforms and Social Cohesion - For a Europe of Innovation and Knowledge". Member States agreed on the strategic goal of making the EU the world's most dynamic and competitive economic area based on innovation and knowledge by 2010. One of the main objectives of the so-called "Lisbon Strategy", which was supplemented by the resolutions of the Stockholm European Council in March 2001, is a significant increase in the employment rate in the European Union.

Such a policy also needs support from a common European social policy. Employment, social affairs and education have already found their way into European politics. This is manifested, among other things, in the establishment of the two Directorates-General for Employment and Social Affairs and Education and Culture.

More and more youth-specific support programs, e.g. The EU Commission's YOUTH program, for example, creates the opportunity to promote the opportunities for political and social participation for disadvantaged young people in European countries.

The role of youth social work at the European level is to work in association with other social organizations from all EU member states as an advocate for disadvantaged young people to exchange ideas about current problems and possible solutions (best practice), the current discussions and processes at European level, for example, about participation To accompany lifelong learning etc. within the framework of the open method of coordination and to participate in overcoming social exclusion.

Please refer to the YES forum (Youth and European Social Work). The task of the YES Forum is to establish lobbying work and representation of interests for "disadvantaged" young people on a European level, to systematically develop and carry out network work and operational (project) activities, and to put the "disadvantaged" young people on the communication platform and into the structural and operational ones Include activities.

German Forum for Youth Social Work

The German Forum for Youth Social Work was founded in October 2004 by the general meeting of the BAG Youth Social Work. The main concern of the forum is to initiate and promote the overall social discourse on the needs and problems of disadvantaged young people and on the field of youth social work with all socially relevant actors. The forum is aimed primarily at representatives from business and associations, politics, trade unions, churches, science and other fields of action in youth welfare. In workshops, discussion forums, strategy talks and conferences, which are carried out under the umbrella of the German Youth Social Work Forum, by the BAG Youth Social Work and its member organizations, the exchange of information between all those involved is to be promoted, an open discourse to be conducted and an opinion-forming process to be initiated . This is also intended to ensure that young people and their needs are perceived again in society and receive a lobby. The main goal of all activities of the German Youth Social Work Forum will therefore be to sensitize the public to the concerns of disadvantaged young people, to provide information about them and to jointly find solutions for how disadvantaged young people can also be successfully integrated into society in the future.

See also

+ Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft (regional working group) of locally regional organizations responsible for youth social work in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania

literature

  • Karl Hugo Breuer : Contributions to the history of Catholic youth social work . Norderstedt 2007, Books on Demand, ISBN 978-3-8370-0973-6 .
  • Breuer, Karl Hugo: Youth social work in the time after the Second World War (1945-1965) . In: Fülbier / Münchmeier (ed.): Handbook of youth social work . Vol. 1, Münster: Votum 2001. P. 47 ff.
  • Manfred Hermanns : youth professional assistance and youth social work in the Weimar Republic . In: youth professional assistance and youth social work in the Weimar Republic. A socio-historical study on social work and social policy. In: Breuer, Karl Hugo (ed.), Yearbook for Youth Social Work. Vol. X. Cologne: Verlag "Die Heimstatt" 1989. pp. 3-65.
  • Manfred Hermanns : Bibliography of youth social work and youth professional assistance 1900 - 2000. Ed. By Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft Katholische Jugendsozialarbeit Nordrhein-Westfalen eV Cologne: Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft Katholische Jugendsozialarbeit Nordrhein-Westfalen 2002. 316 pages. ISBN 3-8311-3390-5 .
  • Peter Schruth: Youth Housing in the Context of the New Social Laws. The right of performance financing according to § 13 Abs. 3 SGB VIII. Norderstedt 2006, ISBN 3-8334-4179-8 .
  • Christian Hampel : youth professional assistance. Legal bases, developments, evaluations . Norderstedt 2006, Books on Demand, ISBN 3-8334-4985-3 .
  • - Peter Schruth: youth professional assistance in demarcation ... "

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